


have you met the wild children?

by gayforroxane



Series: family bends and bleeds [3]
Category: IT (2017)
Genre: and they do, bill and eddie wanna fight everyone, give these kids a good fucking family holy SHIT, love me a family introspective, protests! rallies! cool moms!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 15:38:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13461294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayforroxane/pseuds/gayforroxane
Summary: She picks Eddie and Bill up from the police station at a regular rate of once every eleven days. They cradle ice packs to their noses and mouths and wince when they laugh too hard, but there is a satisfaction to the pain, to the dirtiness that makes them glow. Stan and Richie notice. They often disappear for hours after their boys come back from the station. The rest of the house clears, because ew. Maggie finds Beverly with Ben, the shy boy from next door, four times, all comprising. She finds Beverly with a joint between her fingers, sitting with three other Derry girls, who all cower into their bodies, caress their purple and yellow bruises. Stan begins to leave the door unlocked at all times, and stops pairing his socks. He leaves a trail of unchecked pencils and pens. Richie writes and writes and writes, draws and then writes some more and his room has gone from plastered in band posters to plastered in art and words.or, maggie teaches her children to tell their truth, being a feminist and the losers being Good Kids





	have you met the wild children?

**Author's Note:**

> got some warnings for abuse/sexual harassment y'all - nothing graphic, just mentions

She knows that there are ways that men have learned to treat women. She knows that her mother used to think in terms of 'what's best for my husband?' She knows that she nearly began to think the same way when her husband wrapped dirty hands around her wrists and mashed his mouth against hers, the grotesque sister of a kiss that she wishes she'd never met. 

There have been other women in her life who think like her mother. They navigate the world with sallow smiles and rounded teeth, watching men pass them by, living for men. It is her friends, having sex with men who call them sluts the moment they've finished, who will move onto another girl almost immediately, who will tell his friends about what they did together. They will laugh. It is her cousins, raised in small town America, one with a desperate and appreciative desire for art, the other with a brain made for formulas, chemical and mathematical. They will go to schools in their state, marry husbands they meet there. They will bare two point three children and give up blossoming careers to raise these deformities. 

They will pretend to be content with this. 

Maggie lived a very long time caught between being a woman who obeys her husband and being a woman who takes her four-year-old son to rallies, who spits in police officers' faces and grins when people say 'feminist' like it's a bad word. She likes being a bad word.

Her father says that from the moment she was born, he knew she would be a rule-breaker. When she was a child, little Margaret did not want to be a rule-breaker. Being a rule-breaker is a horrible thing, her mother tells her, her pursed lips white, don't let your father convince you to so unladylike. But little Maggie likes being unladylike. 

When she was eleven, police officers brought her home to her father. They had found her smoking being her school, they told him, picking a fight with another kid. Her father told her that the only reason she was ever allowed to use her fists was to defend someone else. He raised her with sharp elbows and chiseled teeth. Her mother balked at this child - wild and biting, all of the things she was always taught to avoid being. 

When she was twelve, police officers brought her home to her mother. They told her mother that she had stolen a car and a carton of eggs. They stood silent as her mother slapped her across the face, one twice three times, back and forth. Her mother demanded to know why she'd stolen a carton of eggs. Maggie told her mother that she wanted to treat her older brother to a nice breakfast because it was his birthday tomorrow, and on your birthday you get nice things. Like good breakfasts. Her mother blinked at her and said, "Your brother's birthday is on the third of January." Maggie nodded and replied that it was the evening of the second. Her mother slapped her twice more, pushed her into the wall, scolded her when she fell. 

When she was thirteen, her father's house was empty. He was working. In her room was Maggie and a boy, nearly eighteen, who thought she was the same age. She told him that she'd had sex before. He spat in her mouth and put her on her stomach as he fucked her. He came, left bruises on her, and left. She did not move for three days. Her father seemed to know when he came back, and kept his distance from her, offered her comfort in food and quiet conversation, but fewer hugs than usual. 

When she was fourteen, police officers brought her to the station for drug possession. One of the officers cornered her as she was changing out of her soiled skirt and smelly top and stuck his sweaty hands down her underwear. He bit her ear, called her a good girl, and told her to get on her knees. She did. She sucked his cock and cried as she did. She was not charged for drug possession. This is the moment when Maggie learned that her body was the best tool to get men to listen, to obey. 

When she was sixteen, police officers charged her with disturbing the peace and trespassing on private property. She smiled as they took her mugshots and grinned as they took her fingerprints, winked at another boy from the protest as she threw a wild punch at a police officer that she knew would not land. She was charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. 

When she was seventeen, Maggie Wild learned many things. She learned that not taking birth control regularly meant that it did not, in fact, work. She learned that having sex with Wentworth Tozier was thrilling, but unrewarding, and that despite this, she was pregnant with his child. She learned that mothers do not care for their pregnant daughters. She learned that fathers do. She learned that you can be charged with one thing multiple times and that protests made her blood scream, a scream of adrenaline, of bone marrow love. Police officers brought her home and told her father first that she was pregnant, and a slut, and second that she had been arrested and charged with assault and battery, public disturbance, resisting arrest, harassment, and assaulting a police officer. Her father told the police officer that if he ever saw him again, he would have him arrested. 

At forty-one, there is a bookshelf covered in a collage of unframed photos. She grins at a camera, her tongue out, her three middle fingers down and her pinky and thumb extended. Her hair, huge, tangled, black, is caught behind a hot pink bandanna. Her freckles are sharp. She's wearing a leather jacket that shows off skin, showing off broad shoulders and the baby strapped to her chest. There's another one, one of her hands holding her baby's head close to her chest and the other flipping off the camera, her tongue in a woman's mouth - a tall, black woman who is certainly not her husband. A third shows her breastfeeding, exposed and blatant and shameless, standing next to a sign that reads  _GOD IS GAY._ A fourth has her son on the counter, laughing in the ways that babies do, as his mother laughs, a bottle of wine in her hand, in a tiny black dress that clings to her. 

There is a fifth photo, layered on the others, sharper in resolution. It is of the same wild-haired, sharp-toothed woman, surrounded by six other people, both of her middle fingers raised to the camera. A boy with black skin and a white, white smile has his arm around her shoulder, his middle finger raised. Them and their brittle teeth are the only staged part of the image - the others are candid, sprawling and random. To her left is a tall boy with a head of dark wild hair, piled on top of his head in a bun, his hands beneath the thighs of a smaller boy. His face is buried in the smaller boy's neck, whose head is thrown back a huge grin on his face. To her right is another couple, two boys kissing, curly hair and auburn hair, shinning in the sun. They're plastered together from chest to knee, their hands caught in each other's hair. A woman with fiery red hair in a dress that swirls around her thighs is running toward the camera, laughing at whoever's behind it, her smile soft and fond. 

A small caption at the bottom of the photo reads in small, blocked printing:  _the Wild family, August, 2017 - chesterman beach, tofino, BC_

When she's forty, Maggie adopts a rough girl from a horrible father, a smart man from a country family, a Jewish boy with a small-minded family, a stuttering baseball bat of a boy from a life of broken bottles and brothers, and a gay boy from a cruel mother with a cruel, curling tongue. They become her family. 

She takes the rough girl to school everyday, drops her off and makes her lunch and scolds her for stealing her cigarettes ( _go buy your own, Beverly! You're seventeen, I don't want you smoking, but I definitely don't want you stealing my smokes_ ). She sits with her as they do their nails after building bookshelves and helping Mr. Jones demolish the old house on Niebolt. 

She takes the smart man to the library whenever he asks and listens as he tells her about her town, and her own family history. He knows the most about her, about her years from eleven to seventeen and what she learned. She helps him apply for Ivy League schools for history, to New York universities and state colleges. ( _If Columbia doesn't accept you, I'm gonna go kick their asses, you know?_ )

The Jewish boy is her poorly-hidden favourite. ( _Tell me about herrings, Stan_ ). He brings her cider when she's stressed and listens as she talks, her hands louder than her mouth. He trusts her to bring him to therapy, to hear him when he tells her that without the rituals he feels like a disorganized nothing. 

The stuttering boy is the one she knows the least. He is quiet, and the indisputable leader of her small pack of children, the one most likely to throw a punch and to whip with her words, toxic and biting. 

The gay boy is her son's boyfriend, and he argues with her whenever he can and helps when he can't argue. He cooks dinner and helps her clean. He soothes ointment over her burns and bruises ( _God, Maggie, I can fucking tell where Rich got his fucking clumsiness from, holy shit_ ) and pulls slivers from her fingers with a gentle precision that makes her smile. 

They each push her - Mike teaches how to eat better, Bev teaches her that her body is something to be cherished, Bill teaches her that words don't have to come easy to be right, Eddie insists that she learn basic first aid and snaps at her when she doesn't take care of herself. Stan teaches her to speak her truth. (She values all these lessons, but Stan's the most). Richie teaches her to laugh, without restraint, because laughter is  _always_  something that people need. 

She pushes them right back. 

Eddie doesn't need to be so afraid of germs, and she often plasters him with kisses to his cheeks and hugs, smears bacon grease on his hands and throws flour in his face while she bakes. Stan's patterns are often thrown by her - she rearranges things behind him, shifting his books and leaving his laundry on his bed in nine stacks of three. She triples his socks instead of pairing them and teaches him to teach her about what his mind is like. Mike is often handed sweets - a chocolate bar or a square of dates - because food is not a villain, and having something sweet doesn't destroy your body. Money is something that must be handled carefully, but occasionally without restraint. She refuses to allow Bev to cower in fear of men, and pushes her to talk to the cashier taking their order and to ask the shy boy next door to go out with her, because they are all very annoyed with their hesitancy. Sex becomes a well-worn topic, because her body is hers, and she should know exactly how it works. She battles Bill with tongue twisters, shouting new ones at him, pushing him and snapping at him until he spits them out better than she could. Boxing is an outlet that favours his bony knuckles and strong shoulders, his temper and his tongue. She teaches him. Richie is brought into the context of his own body, of the value of his words. She sits him down daily and tells him that people listen when he speaks - that he has power over what he says, and that what people think of him is not his responsibility or his fault. She spits Stan's lessons at him  _(tell your truth)_. 

 _tell your truth_ , she teaches them. 

Sometimes they take her too literally. They blossom. 

She picks Eddie and Bill up from the police station at a regular rate of once every eleven days. They cradle ice packs to their noses and mouths and wince when they laugh too hard, but there is a satisfaction to the pain, to the dirtiness that makes them glow. Stan and Richie notice. They often disappear for hours after their boys come back from the station. The rest of the house clears, because  _ew_. Maggie finds Beverly with Ben, the shy boy from next door, four times, all comprising. She finds Beverly with a joint between her fingers, sitting with three other Derry girls, who all cower into their bodies, caress their purple and yellow bruises. Stan begins to leave the door unlocked at all times, and stops pairing his socks. He leaves a trail of unchecked pencils and pens. Richie writes and writes and writes, draws and then writes some more and his room has gone from plastered in band posters to plastered in art and words. 

 

The six children from the Old House become infamous in Derry, Maine. When new people move to town, sly old women in the streets and gentle young men tell them to watch out for the six children, kids of Maggie Wild.  _They live up to their name_ , they say with a smile. The new people are apprehensive. But maybe they meet a young man dressed in freckles and shorts who pulls rubbing alcohol and bandaids from his fanny pack and plasters them both to bleeding knees with gentle fingers. Their toddler will smile and thank him. The child sit on his hip as he brings them to their parents, their chubby arms around his neck, their chubby legs around his waist. He introduces himself as Eddie, six of six of the Wild children.

Or maybe they meet a boy made of legs and arms and funny voices that makes their children giggle, whose lean body is a perfect jungle gym for six year olds to climb on, whose long hair makes for fun to pull on. He distracts children from their tired mothers and fathers, tires them out on the playgrounds, catches them from swings and helps them learn monkey bars. He hands them over to their parents with a wink and a tip of an imaginary hat. The children curl onto their parents and fall asleep. He introduces himself to the dumbfounded parents as Richie, ( _though you can call me whatever you prefer, Mister and Ma'am, I've heard them all!)_ one of six of the Wild children.

Sometimes, it's when parents come to get their restless thirteen year olds from the library they didn't want to go to, and they find a young man with their children, laughing and teaching them algebra or history or helping them edit their English essays. He eases them when they snarl in frustration and rewards them with high fives and laughter when they smile, flushed and pleased. The parents often have the hesitancy of white parents around non-white people, but lose it, quickly.  _What a nice young man,_ they say, after he introduces himself with a firm handshake and a polite  _pleasure to meet you Mr and Mrs._ He says his name his Mike, and that he is three of six of the Wild children.  _Oh!_ The parents say  _We met your brother at the park_ or  _we met another one of you lot when our youngest scrapped his knee_

There is a boy with auburn hair and a serious mouth who is a blessing to all rough handed seventeen-year-olds. He quells their buzzing hearts and stinging fists and teaches them to throw punch after punch into a sandbag, far less forgiving than a human body, far more painful. He shouts with them, throws insults and grins and loud, rumbling tongue twisters. Parents find their children who snapped at them, or blew smoke in their faces, or flipped them off sweaty and red, standing next to a lean boy with broad shoulders, grinning. Their children greet them with a cheerful  _hi mom!_ unheard of since the seventh grade. They say  _this is Bill! He's been teaching us all day_. The boy won't say anything, just nod and offer them a closed mouth smile, before going to correct a stance or a punch. He throws his head back and laughs and one of the teenagers says  _fuck you, Wild!_ when he makes them do another set of forty sit-ups. The parents look at each other. Five of six of the Wild children, they think, and smile. 

Parents come in to drop off lunches and ask questions about grades and they glance at the metal plaque on the desk and read  _Stanley Uris_. He offers them quiet smiles and quiet words, whatever they need offered without pretense or preamble, simple and gentle. He silences their fears about bullying, recites statistics. The parents who have curling fingers that aren't sure about the correct terms for certain things and ask about obsessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder. He answers their questions with an orderliness that puts them at ease. They extend their hands over his desk and thank him with sincere smiles and introduce themselves. He points at the plaque.  _Stanley Wild_ , he says,  _but please, call me Stan_. Four of six of the wild children. 

Nails are bitten raw and lips chewed through with worry, and a knock sounds at the door. Parents open the door to expect to yell at their daughters for missing curfew. A redheaded stands on their porch and support their daughters with an arm around her waist. She explains in an even voice that  _some asshole spiked her drink, but I got her out of there before anything happened_ or  _some asshole must've spiked her drink. She'll need to go to the hospital in the morning._ She soothes their bitten nails.  _She's alright_ , she says,  _your daughter is stronger than you know_. They thank her, offer her money or food. She shakes her head and smiles, extends her hand.  _I'm Beverly,_ she says,  _two of six of the Wild children. Have you met my brothers?_ The parents nod and smile.  _Oh, you Wild children. You're such sweet kids._

Beverly smiles. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i love maggie wild wowow what a lady? also lemme know what you guys thought/if you have any prompts! please please please lemme know what else you wanna see in this series!  
> hit me up -- http://gay-for-roxane.tumblr.com/


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